John David Washington

My mother taught me how to love.

Movies are magical. It transcends a lot of hate or human faults in real life because of the fantasy of it all.

Every time I was off school, I was in Carolina with my cousins. So it was a big influence on me. I actually experienced straight-up racism out there, too.

As my father started ascending in the business, people around me started to treat me different. Our lives changed. So that anxiety, that sort of resentment, I just funneled it through football.

This is a privilege, what we get to do. To be able to tell stories. It's a luxury. So I have a business-like approach to it, the same way I had with football.

My mother is very positive and encouraging and nurturing, as a mother should be. She's my auditioning partner. She says when it's not good enough; she says when I'm ready.

Like acting, undercover detective work requires a lot of performance. There's just more pressure because it's life-or-death situations.

In football, I learned about trust, handling failure, embracing discomfort, and rejection, which has helped with the auditions.

Whenever you're feeling moments of discomfort, that means true change is happening for you.

I wanna work with filmmakers that love, are enthusiastic about their process - about the process - about their process and the environment of inclusion and collaboration. I want the people to be able to trust me, and I wanna be able to trust them.

They were very supportive parents in all my endeavors. They have very different approaches on how they give advice.

I had family in Carolina who were very hood and talked differently in this sort of Southern cadence.